Post by Miyari
Those undeveloped space's between those pointy mountains could take weeks for blizzard to fill, but mulgore only being an example there are PLENTY of glitches that blizz needs to fill up. Go on a private sever, find yourself a nice flying in azeroth mount. Or get yourself some type of 3rd party program that allows you to *bend* the rules of the private sever and explore not the wonders of azeroth, but the underdeveloped stupidity of it.
Or don't, because not only would doing so be totally against the rules but it could also compromise your WoW account and/or get you banned. Pro advice. You might also want to take the time to read the
Forum FAQ which advises against discussion of such things.
Blizzard have addressed this question before; the blue posts can be found on the
Mount page of WoWWiki.
Unfortunately our designers and developers are not a limitless sea of people; there are decisions that have to be made as to where we should appropriately direct the development efforts. It's our feeling that providing new content, new places to explore and progress your character, new races and professions, all equal a very worthwhile expenditure of our resources. We're definitely committed to ensuring parts of the game already developed continue to be refined, but in this case delaying an expansion for a potentially "very long time" just wouldn't make sense, and wouldn't be very fair to our fans and players who would rather keep progressing their character than flying through places they've already been.
Let's say that we did allow flying mounts in Azeroth and chose to redesign it at some point, it would be no small task. We would need to correct all of the terrain outside of the 'walkable' areas, including building out zones that currently don't exist but through lore are known to exist in those areas. We would also have to rework most outdoor areas as content not intended to be bypassed could be, as well as any possible terrain exploitation potential (ie lots of time testing and refining). We would need to think about what happens when the edge of the map is reached. Since Outland is flat, a bounding wall makes sense, but for a planet that starts to break down. Do players zone in to the other continent while flying or do we make it seamless? If it's seamless we have to rebuild our server architecture, not to mention any further technical issues, etc. etc. While summed up in a sentence or two each of these things would require teams of people working together for a long time to pull off well.
It really all comes down to making the game fun to play for everyone, and allocating resources and time to do that as efficiently as possible. Right now spending time reworking Azeroth so that flying mounts can simply exist, for some ease of travel and sight seeing, doesn't seem like an appropriate use of our time or efforts. In the future though, who knows?
As much as people keep trying to convince us we need to do this there are reasons for things being the way they are. For one, Outland was created specifically with flying mounts in mind. From the ground up to the sky, we worked on the technology involved to make this happen. For another, by keeping them a part of Outland, it makes them unique to the new land and relays a sense of 'ooh and ahh' that they aren't commonplace all around Azeroth too. Also, to retro-fit Azeroth to allow for them would take a lot of time and it's time we'd much rather dedicate to moving forward towards new content than trying to rework something.
Time and resources are two things we are very careful about and as you can see from reading the forums, a lot of people believe we should be doing more with it no matter how much we actually do. We do the best we can to put out fixes and content as quickly as possible but we have a constraint we've put on ourselves as well that if we are going to put something out there, that we should do it well and with Blizzard quality in mind. This is something that will always be at the top of our list to strive for.
